Virginia Woolf Quotes
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You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
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We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
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Marvelous are the innocent.
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If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
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The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
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But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
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Thinking is my fighting.
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Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
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When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
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What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
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It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
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If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
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To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
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Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
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A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
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Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
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Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
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Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
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At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.